Everyone's got advice this week for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, the 70th and 71st hosts in the spastic eighty-two-year history of the Academy Awards. But here's something they can take to the bank — or at least to the stage at the Kodak Theatre on Sunday night: Don't get too comfortable emceeing anything like the Oscars, because until someone figures out whether the populism of our modern maître-d's is best channeled through a Leno or a Conan or (gasp!) a Fallon, you ain't coming back next year. Nor should you, really.

Nothing against the dependably funny Martin and Baldwin, but as their patrons at the Academy are surely aware yet loath to acknowledge, they're just another pair of Rent-a-Hosts in an era when TV personalities are more inseparable than ever from the shows they anchor. From Chris Rock in 2005 to this year's stopgaps, it's fairly shocking that an organization this conservative could still be as irresponsibly slutty as it has been through the last decade's roundelay of A-list talent, misbegotten experiments, and hypersensitivity to criticism. I often wonder when the Oscars will plug that gap with their own Neil Patrick Harris, who last year rescued the Emmys from a five-headed reality-show-host monster of which Ryan Seacrest was somehow not even the worst part. What every awards show — if not every talk show, NBC's yawn-worthy 11:35 slot included — needs now isn't so much the kids playing musical chairs as an old reliable party clown to satisfy the kids watching back home. Even if stability comes in the form of Jimmy Fallon tweeting on stage.

After all, if there's any phenomenon more reliable than the Oscars, it's an audience's relationship to a beloved host. And that relationship has changed more than the Academy seems to understand since its Bob Hope years. I mean, we're a quarter-century into the Age of Oprah, whose accomplishments as a TV and film producer, a magazine impresario, and a bookselling powerhouse all stemmed from her command of a syndicated daytime talk show. When the Academy offered Ellen DeGeneres her only gig in 2007, the Oscars were actually ahead of the curve on a sitcom actress who was about to change what it meant to be a host: you be nice, you bring people in, and then you expand the borders of your sanctuary to the ends of the cultural universe, with enough down-to-earth identity to expand its population, too.

If anything, Ellen brought the relatability of her own influential daytime enterprise to the Kodak; when you walk down the aisle to hand Martin Scorsese a script or take a profile photo for MySpace (!) with Clint Eastwood, you get the kind of sincerity and humor found in maybe one out of a hundred acceptance speeches. That's the kind of host the Oscars have been missing of late, yet somehow Hollywood mistook the self-satisfied presence of Jon Stewart (2006 and 2008) and the banal showmanship of Hugh Jackman (2009) for ahead-of-the-curve populism. That's the kind of arms-wide-open trajectory award shows could be riding, yet somehow Ellen's tearing up American Idol and we're here talking about the So You Think You Can Dance segment and whether Baldwin will put on his Donaghy face. Baldwin and Martin are a little closer to the real thing, except that they're stars first, and then hosts. Ellen DeGeneres? She was born to host.

Some says the same thing about Conan O'Brien, whom I've wanted to watch at the Oscars for years. But I'm not so sure: If he can't even convince Rupert Murdoch he'll woo the mainstream orthodoxy in late-night, how the hell would he fare live at 5:30 on the West Coast? Someone like Fallon could be a different story, however, and not least because his persona transcends a time slot. His handling of Generation Y — aided by the roiling, 24/7 spontaneity of Twitter, YouTube, and NBC's own considerable Web efforts — will determine to what extent he'll build a more fluid hosting empire in the Oprah/Ellen mold. The more I watch TV on nights like Monday, when Jay Leno returned to the Tonight Show with some ghastly taped segment about senior citizens' furniture but Fallon had back-to-back viral clips with Robert Pattinson and a Lost parody, the more it looks like this little twerp might have the confidence, consistency, and mass-pop profile to host a whole new kind of Oscars five years from now.

But whose Academy Awards would they be for Fallon to inherit? Ultimately I'm thinking of a quick-thinking, slightly quirky yet eminently accessible personality who'll give as much to Academy mythology as he or she takes from the very same — the one transaction the Oscars are just too stubborn to make, even in the era of ten nominees for Best Picture. This twist may make the Baldwin/Martin matter sort of a moot point anyway, because unless their shtick completely bombs, the Year of Avatar should provide a ratings boost that will suggest the Academy has found its men. Unless the TV talk-show hosts find their way first, I'd suggest the opposite: Now is the time for risk. Maybe the Academy will shock everybody and roll the dice on O'Brien. Or let Jimmy Kimmel get a few front-row egos squirming. Or, in the middle of America's Tea-Party-Recession-Idol-Worshipping rut, just go back to Ellen, and let the Oscars win back some pragmatic appeal. It's always going to be Hollywod's night no matter who's in charge, but it really couldn't hurt to let viewers think they are.

S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded.

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